Benedict Evans: "How do you segment without fragmenting? Apple achieved this pretty easily with the iPod by varying the storage, but that wouldn't be meaningful for the iPhone. The cheap one has to run the apps, but people still have to have a reason to buy the expensive one. What you can do is vary the Apple supplied features, without varying the hardware and API platform that your third-party developers are targeting." Like I said: iOS 6 Starter, iOS6 Home, iOS 6 Professional, and iOS 6 Ultimate. Microsoft got blasted for confusing and arbitrary segmentation - rightfully so - but as usual, Apple gets a free pass when it does the exact same thing. At least Microsoft uses different names and forces OEMs to be clear about what they're shipping. I've said it before: I find calling all these different versions "iOS 6" without modifiers pretty scummy and misleading.

BMW works very hard to ensure that the design for its cars changes very slightly year on year. Part of this is to ensure that people who bought a BMW the previous year still feel "special". You bought last year's model, but you're still fashionable. If you bought last year's model and the BMW changed significantly, it would hurt you socially. In order to protect your investment in a BMW, you have to ensure that BMW doesn't change models significantly.

Don't get me wrong, the savvy user could still look at a BMW and say "oh that's last year's model; it doesn't have X" but that sounds a bit nerdy, so no one does it. A BMW is a BMW and it comes with the status and fashion that comes with it. The tech is beside the point.

Apple is the same. Their new strategy of not even differentiating models of iPad (now "the new iPad" instead of "iPad 3") makes it harder for people to tell which iPad you have. I'm guessing they'll do the same for the new iPhone, and that it'll look much the same. All phones will get iOS6 but some will be limited. Sure you could identify the differences between the models and the features, but that would be a bit nerdy.

So you can get an iPhone, and protect your fashion investment and social standing over the years. However the lack of features will make you feel slowly more socially inept until you are forced to upgrade. The tech is beside the point.